Last week we noticed wasps buzzing around part of the deck of our home, flying up and down through the spaces between the planks. Going down under the deck I found a large and very active nest, which, given its proximity to our front door, needed to be destroyed. Since then I have been thinking about wasps and bees and all of the other tribes of social insects, their habits and how they live.

I am wondering if there is perhaps a new species of social insect which is evolving, a species with billions of members. It is, of course, human beings I’m thinking about. Could it be we are changing into a new type of human – more insect-like, less mammalian? A thousand years ago 19 out of 20 humans lived agrarian or nomadic lives, now most of us live in urban areas and the shift is accelerating, with almost half now living in towns and cities, something that has really only been the case in the last hundred years. In some ways we are ill suited to being part of a large hive, as our lack of intimate relationships with other life forms has lessened our sense of being a part of a sentient, life-filled earth. For urban dwellers, only pets are everyday partners in their experience of life, and that for only about half. For the other half, without pets, our lives are lived only with each other. Our society, and our place within it, is now the be-all and end-all of our existence. Thus, the traditional indigenous ways of experiencing and being part of this glorious world are now lost, likely gone forever.

How we live out our lives in cities has been an enormous change in a very short timeframe, but it is technology that is causing us to change in even faster ways. Faster and more multifaceted. It began with social media. Communication between ten or ten thousand people happens now in a way that is like the swarm intelligence of the insects, where, through pheromones in the air, information is constantly exchanged from individual to individual and across all the inhabitants of the colony. For us, our group knowledge, spread through social media and the internet, is replacing communication by in-person speech, and the collective intelligence of the swarm is replacing our individualized knowledge.

With AI the process has accelerated, as the sum total of human knowledge forms the cloud of (un)knowing that allows and causes us to no longer need to think for ourselves. We simply regurgitate what is in the cloud, eliminating the effort needed to craft original ideas. Educators now encounter this in all of their classes, it is already ubiquitous. Finally, the superorganism that is AI is on its way to becoming our actual inner life of thoughts and ideas. And, like bees, we all will know the same things and act from these same things.

What was missing until recently was a means to stay constantly connected to the swarm and the swarm intelligence. But that lack was filled by Steve Jobs.

Our phones are our antennas, and it is becoming more and more unusual to be without them. Information about food sources, weather, dangerous events and all the means we need to function in society are received by our antennas. People become nervous when they are separated from their phones, fearing that they will be lost, literally and figuratively, losing their place in the hive. Young people now begin the mating dance through their antennas, communicating alluring pieces of swarm knowledge to each other, leading finally to in-person meetings much, much later in the process. Communicating through the phone is now seen as more in keeping with what society expects. To be clear, the communication is not by voice but by text, as text allows a further distancing from personalization, more in keeping with who we now are. Connecting through the phone and social media has already changed the way we read, and the very wiring patterns in our brains for comparison and logical inference developed through reading long passages are diminishing rapidly. But insects don’t require that kind of logical structure, and, apparently, neither do we.

As always, America leads the way in this evolution. We have formed into two major colonies, antagonistic to each other, and each relying on entirely different swarms of knowledge. One colony is red, the other blue. The movement toward unthinking, automatic anger has already begun. We mistrust and even hate each other, but we are united in our hate, for we hate together, all of the red hating alike, and the blue also, just like the ants.

This new world order is a life very different from the life of past humans, a life we haven’t evolved for. Hive life is not human life, but it’s what we have embraced as our destiny, and this destiny will unmake us. It appears to be an inexorable process; we will become different as a result of the choices we’ve made. Whether this applies to all or only to most remains to be seen.

Further reading: Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster, and Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf.

Comments are welcome.